Prior to the release of George Lucas’ Return of the Jedi in 1983, theaters were designed with little thought pertaining to the reproduction of a film’s soundtrack. THX brought a devotion of maintaining the exact same mixes sent out from studios by calibrating theaters to a certain paradigmatic design; thus, everyone could hear the same film. Shortly after came 5.1 Surround Sound, the methodical placement of speakers around a viewer, immersing them within the world of a story. With the inclusion of developments by Dolby and various other companies, audiences now find themselves living within the world of modern sound technology. Today, obstacles regarding frequency limitation no longer exist. Bit depth and dynamic range, the perception of the lowest sound a human can hear in relation to the highest, has been vanquished. Theaters can now play recordings so well captured that it can become difficult to distinguish what is real and what is fantasy. With such tremendous accomplishments, one must ask, “To where is it leading?” This question was posed to Mr. Holman, and he responded by saying that “the one thing we need is spatial differentiation. This can be separated into two distinct parts: Imaging and envelopment. Imaging: the sense of placing sound in space; and envelopment: the sense of being immersed in that space." He mentioned that this could be accomplished through a simple, “logical logarithm,” one applicable to speaker position and quantity. From 5.1 one moves to 10.2, ten speakers and two subwoofers precisely calculated to engulf an audience and erase all effort to resist suspension of disbelief.
The idea in developing 10.2 is to essentially “fill in the holes left by 5.1,” to ensure that sound remains unbroken, a single invisible bubble from one end of the room to another, thereby solidifying an audience’s absolute acceptance of the world which has been brought to them. In addition to the front speakers used by 5.1, 10.2 implements four more directed towards the front of the viewer, a left center and a right center at roughly 45 degree angles from the screen, and two atop the original left center/right center speakers (much of our spatial discernment stems from these overhead locations). Positioned directly to the left and right of the viewer are the two subwoofers, placed on the floor; and directly behind the viewer is a new central back speaker, allowing sounds to pan more smoothly from left to right. The last addition, and the most interesting, is a pair of heightened speakers situated over the subwoofers. Each of these speakers is actually two, facing opposite directions perpendicular to the direction of the screen. These speakers pump out “fill tracks.”
A nice comparison of these “fill speakers” would be a glass of ice. Say the glass is full, though absolutely no air is to be allowed within it. In order to occupy the areas between the ice, the glass is filled with water. In the context of sound, 5.1 has issues panning and fluidly completing the movement of an effect from one speaker to another. In order to disguise the pan and prevent the audience from noticing a “jump” between speakers, fill sound is emitted throughout the entire room by the aforementioned extra speakers, in the process obliterating the notion that any single speaker exits whatsoever.
10.2 is most definitely achieving its objective of furthering the cinematic experience, and standardization has already been set, an option now found in media programs such as QuickTime. A few theaters in the U.S. even have the system installed, though as of yet, no 10.2 feature films have been released (though there has been a short or two). Nonetheless, upon experiencing the demo, which includes an expansive concert hall performance of Handel’s rousing "Hallelujah Chorus," as well as a lighting fast, ubiquitous bouncing ping-pong ball swerving from one corner of the room to the next within a quarter of a second, it is undeniable that one forgets he or she is merely sitting in a sparse, 30 X 20 foot dead-air room.
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